genuinegirly

Now that I'm married, sex talk is no longer taboo. I honestly didn't think it'd have this much of an impact on me. The stigma is gone. Tt's family doesn't bother us when we leave the door closed (I think they want grandkids). No one expects me to sleep on the couch. My mother didn't blush the other day when she offered her king-size bed while she left for vacation. I find it easier to discuss sex, play, toys, etc. with our friends in relationships, these conversations are no longer reserved for this forum alone.

I don't quite understand the change. I believe it is because family is now comfortable, and it's taking away a shame I never realized I felt. Or is it something else. I believe this was only the case because we were both raised in families where premarital sex was highly discouraged - it would be different if our families were more open about sex.

Have any of you experienced a similar shift when you were newly married? Or perhaps at another turning point in life? Do share!

__________________
"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy

snowy

Sex was never taboo in my family. We've always discussed it openly and honestly. My mother was honestly surprised I waited as long as I did. I lost my virginity in my parents' home, in my own bed, because I knew they were comfortable with that. They always respected my privacy and space. Obviously, now that I actually have sex, the talk has gotten a bit racier. That's okay, though.

My SO and I have been together for almost three years now--my parents wouldn't dream of separating us when we visit, and his parents don't care. The only times we have slept in separate beds were a couple of family get-togethers that included my SO's conservative aunt and uncle and their "impressionable" daughter (who got knocked up a few months later) shortly after we had moved in together. But now they don't care either--or rather, they no longer have the room to talk.

__________________
If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Cernunnos

My family is comprised of conservative Christians who don't believe it's proper to openly discuss sex. My parents made several vague attempts to explain the act itself and the importance of abstinence when I was coming into puberty, and brief mention of protection during later teenage years. To be honest, they're both uncomfortable with the subject and it showed.

All of my escapades have been done quietly and in private, and if my parents ever suspected, they turned a blind eye towards what was happening in my bedroom. I'm sure the closed door gave some indication.

As for myself, I have never cared for taboos and will openly discuss any subject. If I ever refuse to try something, it's because the act either grosses me out (fecal play) or it's dangerous (uh... sex on top of a moving car?). I've also never believed in God and consider myself an agnostic atheist, so religious suppression thankfully doesn't factor in.

Atreides88

My parents never talked to me about it. My Dad caught me numerous times surfing for porn, but it was never discussed.

And despite the lack of communication I still managed to figure it all out and become what some might refer to as a pervert or a deviant. The taboo itself was probably broken the minute I took the long giant leap onto the internet and discovered ALL of the things people do for gratification.

As for sex itself, my first time was with a girl who liked it very rough, which pushed me out of my comfort zone at first, but blew my mind once I got into it.

__________________
"There is no need to suppose that human beings differ very much one from another: but it is true that the ones who come out on top are the ones who have been trained in the hardest school." -- Thucydides

jewels

I believe that's comparable to my experience with my mom. From my early years, I couldn't stand my mother. It wasn't until I became pregnant that I was finally able to identify with her. Although the relationship isn't perfect, we've been able to maintain that bond. I guess understanding the depth of love for our children was enough that I could understand some of the decisions she'd made in the past.

We've never discussed sex. Well, not until I was 17 and pregnant. Sometimes any change in status can make all the difference as far as opening dialogue goes.

__________________
We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
Mark Twain

LoganSnake

Never been a taboo. Mom has been making sex jokes with us since we were kids. When I'm with a girl and close my door, nobody bothers us. Sleeping together overnight isn't a problem either.

My gf's mom, however is the complete opposite...

That's why I never stayed over at their place.

__________________
Maturity is knowing you were an idiot in the past. Wisdom is knowing that you'll be an idiot in the future. Common sense is knowing that you should try not to be an idiot now. - J. Jacques

ngdawg

I grew up in a very sexually hypocritical household. My dad had quite a porn collection but my mom acted like we came from the cabbage patch. When they found out I wasn't a virgin at 18, everything fell apart-my mom screamed at me, said the "rent" I'd been paying them wasn't going to go toward my future wedding( I didn't know they were even saving it for that) and my dad, also finding out the guy was married, admitted to wanting to beat the crap out of me.
To this day, sex is still not discussed except under the guise of a joke. Ironically, all of my parents' daughters are extremely sexually liberal.

Jinn

The freakiest girl I ever knew was a minister's daughter.

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

lotsofmagnets

my experience mirrors the 1st 1/2 of snowy´s post.

i think a turning point for me was becoming comfortable with my own body. a series of experiences including jumping naked into a river with 2 lesbians several years ago, having a girlfriend for several months and getting with a gorgeous finnish girl who spent much of the night telling me i was hot. just yesterday i was discussing with a girl i´ve known barely 2 days whether it´s actually possible to cry and masturbate at the same time (or laugh, if anyone can answer this conclusively please let me know ) so as far as i´m concerned the cat is pretty much out of the bag.

__________________
mother nature made the aeroplane, and the submarine sandwich, with the steady hands and dead eye of a remarkable sculptor.
she shed her mountain turning training wheels, for the convenience of the moving sidewalk, that delivers the magnetic monkey children through the mouth of impossible calendar clock, into the devil's manhole cauldron.
physics of a bicycle, isn't it remarkable?

Willravel

When? About 13-15 years old, I would guess. When I was discovering sexuality, I was also casting off religion. It helped me in forming a more healthy understanding of sex, I believe (which is not to say all religious people have an unhealthy understanding of sex).

Milkyway

Sex Taboo? Totally not possible with me. I saw my parents going at it when I was five and often heard or saw their activities while I was growing up, my older brothers said they never saw or heard anything-don't know what's up with that.

Anyway, I have been fascinated with sex for as long as I can remember. I always talked about sex, first conversations with friends were in the third grade, and we really went over details and experiences and stuff. I was what you might call an early bloomer. I remember having a dream about being pregnant when I was in the fourth grade!!!

I started doing speeches about sex when I was in junior high, I would travel with a group of teens and twenty somethings to schools and youth groups and talk about sex to preteen and teenagers. Even today I often embarrass people with my openness about the topic. I have a friend (raised strict catholic) who is married and still feels sex is taboo-poor girl and her poor husband.

I am willing to answer just about any question on the topic and talk about it with everyone, even my in laws and did even before we got married-totally embarrasses my husband-but whatever. I even see patterns of behavior in my toddlers that lead me to suspicions about what their sexual interests will be, and I find it fun-I can't wait until they are big enough to really talk about it. I love sex, but I also know not everyone enjoys it and that's a shame-I want to make sure my kids grow up and have healthy, happy sex lives. But I also know they will have some bad experiences as well, which most of us do, but I want to give them the tools and knowledge to get the most out of the experience.

I guess I am a little crazy about sex-but hey I am who I am.

__________________
Yes you can get off on the same sexual experience for 24 full hours!!!!!

Destrox

I sometimes wish my family was more sexually held back...

They are just too open sometimes ya know?

But you learn a lot, and I'd rather be informed than naive.

__________________
You bore me.... next.

serlindsipity

i learned most everything from my pesonal experimentation. phsyically i have no taboos (and have been that way since i was 16) but i do have a tough time talking about sex still to this day (and as such, i squirm like i am 10 when talking about it to anyone other than my closest of friends).

__________________
My third eye is my camera's lens.

little_tippler

Maybe a few years ago. I started feeling more at ease talking about sex with my close friends and now I'm pretty open to that. Some people I don't want to talk to about it, because it's in an inappropriate context, to me anyway. I don't particularly want to talk about sex to everyone.

With family, I don't talk about it. I am not religious and neither were my parents but we never spoke of sex much, except when they said I had to go on the pill if I wanted to date a guy 5 years older than me. I guess it's a little taboo...but only because I never wanted to talk about it with them. I guess they never volunteered much either. They did give me a book about sex at one point though. It was very graphic!

What I've learned is through experience, other people, and what I've seen and read.

I feel there are still some taboos in my head. Social ones mainly. Hopefully with time and more experience they too will be broken. I am quite communicative so the tendency for me is to talk things through.

__________________
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

Fernando Pessoa, 1918

Jenna

Sex has always been a taboo subject in my household, although occasionally, now that I'm older, my mom does make some jokes surrounding it. But, it just seems so odd because we NEVER talked about sex. Ever.

But I'm the exact opposite, I'm really open about sex.

PlanG

I would never talk about sex with my parents (aside from the "use protection" etc stuff.. I'd never discuss tactics!), and I cannot see why anyone would even contemplate chatting with the parents of the girl you're tapping.. that surely has no tact whatsoever.

However, I have no problem talking about it with friends of either sex, although when talking to girls I am probably more reserved with descriptions. It's not really a taboo at all in this country, especially as there seem to be far fewer no-sex-before-marriage style families, or heavily religious ones, come to think of it, in comparison with what I have heard of the USA.

As far as staying over, when I was underage (16), my parents wouldn't allow me to have girls stay over; I got the couch. Now I'm older it's fine though.

I'm not sure about the situation with staying over at my girlfriend's, especially since I am her first so I don't know if she has had guys stay around before, but from what I have seen of her parents, they appear to like me and appreciate I'm not just one of the womanising players, so I hope they will have no problem with it.

mixedmedia

Sex was always discussed freely in my home growing up. Not with my father (my parents got divorced when I was young), but neither of my parents took any pains to hide sex from me. They both took me to movies when I was young without considering the sexual content...they both had good taste in movies, though, so the advantages of becoming a film buff far outweigh any consequences to sexual material at a young age. In my opinion, at least.

I don't really talk about my own sexual experiences with my family, per se, but we do discuss sex without timidity or embarrassment. My mother knows that I am kinky (through an unfortunate circumstance that I won't get into here - it's too much of a bummer, lol) but she's not one to freak out about such knowledge.

So I've never thought about the subject of sex as 'taboo,' but I talk about it on a personal level with very few people. Excepting of course the 10,000 or so people who visit the TFP.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

World's King

When I fisted that dude behind that 7-11...

__________________
heavy is the head that wears the crown

ASU2003

I have never talked about sex outside of the internet. It depends who it is, but most likely I either wouldn't be able to talk about it or be 12-year-old boy embarrassed talking about it.

Hyacinthe

In most of my family sex is a no no when it comes to discussions this is true, my parents for all they love me and my siblings tend to be ultra conservative when it comes to sex. So much so that the only advice my sister and I received from our mother in regards to sex was "If you pee afterwards you're less likely to get a UTI" this was maybe 2 months ago - my sister and I are both in our 20's and my elder brother told us this about 5 years ago.

My sister and I however are almost outrageously open with eachother - to the point where she will ask me about porn dvd's and sites so thatshe can watch them with her BF and discuss the merits of different positions. Just a week ago I woke her up at 1am (in my defence her light was on) to lace up a corset for me.

I am also very open with my friends, not a night together goes by without alot of jokes flying around about our sexual tendencies, specially my female friends. Most of them work as strippers and once you've sat and had a conversation with a girl while each of you are naked and doing whatever to induce customers, well you lose alot of inhibitions.

__________________
"I want to be remembered as the girl who always smiles even when her heart is broken... and the one that could brighten up your day even if she couldnt brighten her own"

"Her emotions were clear waters. You could see the scarring and pockmarks at the bottom of the pool, but it was just a part of her landscape – the consequences of others’ actions in which she claimed no part."

Pogue Mahone

Same here. Her and (surprisingly) a Mormon girl I dated were total freaks. But I did help corrupt the Mormon girl.

Back on topic, I'm a Methodist that went to a Catholic school during my early teens. My parents didn't talk too much about sex (and when it came time for my dad to, it was perhaps the most awkward moment between him and I), and the message I was getting from my Catholic training was that of "you're going to Hell if you have sex!". It wasn't until I was nineteen when my sexual taboo was broken.

/Late bloomer.

__________________
I still wave at the dots on the shore
And I still beat my head against the door
I still rage and wage my little war
I'm a shade and easy to ignore

abaya

Funny, missed this thread when it first came around (I was in Spain, I think).

Yes, my Thai family definitely started acting differently after I got married--even though ktsp and I had been having sex for years before that, we still had to sleep in "different" rooms when we were home visiting my mom (mostly due to grandma/uncle living with us, not my mom--she didn't really care, after she got over the initial shock of my not being a virgin). The older women in the family joke with me about dirty stuff all the time now, which is funny because they just could not before--even though I would have been fine with it. My dad also makes jokes about sex more often now, though he started doing that when I was dating ktsp and figured out that I was having sex. I don't think he has cared particularly much... after all, I was 24 when I lost my virginity.

I think for me, the big sexual taboo that I broke was not having sex... it was masturbation. Since I was an evangelical for most of my teen and college years, it never occurred to me to masturbate--it was one of those things that I just kept a mental distance from, since I felt that it was a distraction from the pursuit holiness (yes, yes, say what you will--but I believed it whole-heartedly at the time).

Finally, when I was about 22, I let myself start thinking about masturbation and sex after a friend brought up the topic. As Will said, that decision went along with my slow walk away from religion--and I haven't looked back since.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Anormalguy

Sexual discussions with my wife has never been taboo, but it was and still is in my family.

I received mixed messages about sex when I was growing up. My father never said a word about sex, but then and again he never said much about anything. My mother would joke openly about sex & enjoying it, but would never have frank discussions (perhaps she did with my sisters, I've never asked). This didn't change after I got married, but I'm 99% sure it had much to do with the fact that I'm male, & any such conversations would've been very uncomfortable.

Since we've been married my wife has had more open discussions about sex with her mother, but the discussions still tend to be fairly general.

I wasn't a virgin when I got married, although I was pretty close given my extremely limited experiences . I was always intrigued by the stories in the mens magazines, most especially Penthouse Variations (keep in mind when I was a randy teenager BETA was in its early infancy, & there was no internet).

It was my good fortune to marry a fantastic young woman who enjoys sex and is very openminded about sexual experimentation. We discuss anything and everything openly without worrying about hurting each others feelings.

I can calmly discuss pretty much any sexual activity or situation with just about anyone with little or no embarrassment, at least on my part. That does not, however, mean that I'm automatically open about all of my sexual proclivities, there are some things best left to the anonymity of internet forums.

curiousbear

my parents never spoke about sex. even friends do not talk about it. i avoided porn with pictures and always choose that has only text.
only recently I talk about it open with my gf. only place where I talk about it really open and explore is on internet. I learnt many of the possibiliites from online friends and forum.

digme

Its not something that comes up with my parents, and when it does (even jokingly) I try to steer the conversation elsewhere. Maybe I'm not as open about it as I thought I was?

Ayashe

I can't say that I ever had a discussion in my family about sex other than the usual puberty discussions. I think my dad would have a coronary if it were brought up.